Newspaper Source: Provides full text for 20 national & international newspapers, including The Christian Science Monitor, USA Today, The Washington Post, The Times (London), Toronto Star, etc. Also contains selected full text for more than 230 regional (U.S.) newspapers.

ASME Digital Library: online access to all available volumes of the technical journals and conference papers starting with 2002. NOTE: To access the ASME magazine, Mechanical Engineering, you have to search in Academic Search Complete.

IEEE Xplore: All areas of Engineering, including Electrical and Computer Engineering

No full-text?Click the button to see if it is available in another database or in print in the library.

Brainstorming Keywords

Choose keywords which represent the main concepts of your topic. Then for each concept, choose a number of keywords, including synonyms and related terms. [Be aware: some terms are more common in the scientific literature (hydraulic fracturing) while others are more often used by the general public (fracking).]

Renewable energy:

wind energy

wind power plants

wind turbines

Noise:

noise pollution

noise regulations

noise levels

noise reduction

noise emission

aerodynamic noise

Often times when searching on popular topic your first search will bring back too many results.

Refine your results by adding additional keywords:

Wind energy (10,000 results)

-> wind turbines (7,000 results)

--> wind turbines AND noise (400 results)

---> wind turbines AND noise AND rotors (52 results)

Find Books

"There is fantastic information in books. Often when I do a search, what is in a book is miles ahead of what I find on a Web site." —Sergey Brin

When you find a good title, follow the subject headings for more books on the topic.

When you find the book, browse other books in the same area for similar resources.

TIPS:

Take note of the location of the book, we have over 10 libraries.

The call number will help you locate the book on the shelf

Take note of the current status: If there is a date listed instead of "AVAILABLE" that means the book is checked out to another person. But you can request the book back by clicking on the Pick it Up link.

Wikipedia - free encyclopedia (authors are anonymous, sometimes vetted by the public) TIP: Looking at the list of references at the end of a wikipedia entry often provides links to newspaper articles, magazine articles, government reports, book titles, and websites. Less often = scholarly articles.